The Wish Maker

by Ali Sethi

  “Where are you going?”

  “Some food place. He said it’s outdoors. Please come with me.”

  They went that night to a place called Paisa Akhbar. It was far away, far from Nargis’s house, which was in a place called Gulberg, and far also from Sami’s house, which was on the canal and which she hadn’t seen. They went in Sami’s car, a small car, but there were four of them in it and they fit. They went to a stall that was surrounded by long metal tables and plastic chairs, and sat at one of the tables in the dark street, Nargis and Zakia on one side and Moeen and Sami on the other, and ate nihari with naans. The nihari came in small plastic bowls that had smears on their rims. It was a thick meat sauce; it slid repeatedly down her wrists.

  “Eat like me,” said Sami, and showed her.

  The next day she said to him, “What do you think of Moeen?”

  “Good fellow,” he said.

  “What do you think of Nargis?”

  “She’s nice,” he said. “She’s a good friend of yours.”

  She thought it was an odd thing to say.

  “Where are your friends?” she said.

  He said they were in various places.

  “When will I meet them?”

  “When they’re here.”

  She accepted this nomadic life. He was serving in a government institution; it wasn’t even a government institution, it was its own entity and had its own requirements. But her idea of Lahore was attached to her idea of him, and she needed him to make it come alive.

  “What do you want to do?” he said.

  They were driving in his car with their windows down. It had rained, and the water from puddles shot up and splashed beneath the tires.

  “I want to go to places,” she said. “I want to see things.”

  They went first to the shrine of Daata Saab, an eleventh-century Sufi who was believed to be the grantor of Lahore’s many wishes. The courtyard was open. She left her shoes at the entrance and felt the stone under her feet, warmed at midday by the mild winter sun. A thousand years! She was expecting a ruin but had found a dwelling: there were people in the long corridors on the sides, huddled against walls and stretched out on straw mats, some asleep, others awake, still others in a median state. He led her through the courtyard to the grave, which was located within the shade of a marble enclave and was guarded by a brood of squatting pigeons. They seemed vaguely aware of intrusion. She raised her hands in prayer and tried not to look at the pigeons, then closed her eyes to show that she was lost.

  And there were shrines that came alive only at night. One Thursday after sundown they went in Sami’s car to the tomb of Shah Hussein, which lay behind many sodden lanes in a place called Baghbanpura. The saint, she knew, was buried next to his lover, a Hindu boy called Madho Lal. There was a graveyard before the tomb, with old, twisting trees that grew between the graves. A fire burned in a corner; a man was singing to the flames; another sat beside him and struck a drum from time to time. They went toward the grave but it was locked for the night; a shawl-wearing man, the custodian, led them in silence to another grave at the back of the compound, and it was the grave of the saint’s sister, smaller but lit brightly with round electric lights that hung from strings on the walls. The custodian waited for them outside the chamber, was pleased to be paid, and told them to come back in a week’s time for the saint’s death anniversary. Then the courtyard was filled with noise and crowded with bodies; a woman was standing in a clearing with her hands on her knees and spinning her hair rapidly to a drummer’s beat. Hanging on the air was the aroma of hashish, which was thick and sweet, and reminded Zakia of the other shrine smell, the compound stench of feet and roses and perspiration. She kept her head above the noise and kept looking at the things around her. Here too the colors and the sounds, brought out to commemorate the dead, were accompanied by the sight of useless limbs, of pustules and sores on the arms and legs of the living. But she could observe it only with an outsider’s apprehension, an unease that came from an encompassing awareness of herself, the formality of her clothes, her shoes, the hair she had tied up in a pointless ponytail, the absurdity of being even slightly mindful in a place where others appeared not to care. She looked away and kept walking. And it fed the same experience, which was one of growing familiarity within a romance.

  He showed her the fort and the dungeons underneath. They were dank and broken, littered with rubble. (She had envisioned complex torture chambers.) Other parts were suddenly grand: they sat cross-legged on the broad steps built for royal elephants and wandered into the royal gardens where queens and princesses had once frolicked, past their ghostly quarters to the narrow, octagonal pools where they had bathed. At the Shalimar Gardens she put her foot in a waterless pool and made a face.

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “There’s no water.”

  He summoned a chowkidaar and paid him. The man was quick; he placed a hand on his heart and went to see about the water. And when it came she splashed her feet in the fountain frivolously, and didn’t laugh or say that she was happy.

  She bought a map. It was a jumble of locations and place names. She decided she needed people to bring it alive.

  But Sami’s friends knew only one another. Even when they converged it was to sprint competitively in a park, or to gather around a table with beers and cards and talk of their days in Risalpur, the things they had done and said and the punishments they had been awarded. (There was a special kind of punishment that involved walking to the hostel with a parachute attached to the shoulders. It was intended, like the other punishments they had described, to humiliate.) They had nicknames that corresponded to their speeds: Scooter, Machhar, Cheetah, Fokker, Turtle. Around her they were gruff and uncommunicative. She felt like an obstacle.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Turtle’s house. Some boys getting together.”

  She appeared to think about it and said, “Why do we always have to go to Turtle’s house?” She had allowed her irritation to show.

  “You don’t like Turtle’s house?”

  She wanted to slap his face.

  “That’s not what I mean,” she said.

  He said, “Oh,” and sat down next to her, waiting for her to explain what she meant.

  She complained to Nargis.

  And Nargis offered to introduce her to her own friends.

  Nargis’s friends were the people who met in the evenings at the house of a woman called Hania Apa, a middle-aged woman of medium height who kept her hair in a mannish crop and didn’t wear dupattas or shawls. Instead she wore the frayed handloom kurtas that Zakia associated with male politicians, and the sleeveless sadri jackets that were favored by Punjabi ministers. She hadn’t married, and lived alone in a two-bedroom flat with no help—she didn’t believe in servants—and drove her own car to the arts college, where she ran the art history department on a tight, unsubsidized budget. Her circular drawing room was like a museum, and had shelves on all the walls and hanging tapestries and oddly placed pots and metal artifacts that were deliberately left unpolished. The books on the shelves were about women and countries and diseases, and often had short confrontational titles that were easy to remember and repeat. Hania Apa enjoyed Nargis and watched her with amused interest. She wasn’t warm or welcoming when Zakia first went to her house.

  “This is my friend Zakia,” Nargis had said.

  And Hania Apa had shaken her hand.

  She was a chain smoker, and smoked so many cigarettes on that first night that the windows had to be opened and the fan switched on to relieve the asthmatic woman who was sitting on one of the colorful floor cushions. There was drinking and talking, then eating and talking, then drinking and talking again.

  “Did you like it?” said Nargis afterward.

  And Zakia said that it was interesting, which was what she had heard most people say that night about the things they were discussing.

  She wanted to go again, and went.

 
; “Not coming to Turtle’s?” His voice was like a child’s on the phone.

  “No,” she said, the way Nargis would say it.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  She hung up the phone and went into the drawing room to lay out the bottles and the glasses.

  After nine o’clock the bell was ringing at expected intervals. Hania Apa was in her chair, her frank feet settled on a low ottoman, her hands clasped in brazen laxity behind her head. (Already there were blooms of sweat in the armpits, and Zakia switched on the fan.) Two women were sitting on the sofa and were listening appreciatively to Hania Apa’s take on a law that was going to be passed within the month. A bald, slender man arrived, nodded at the seated women and bent over the table to pour whiskey in a glass. The doorbell rang again; Zakia went to see but Nargis was already at the door, and it was Moeen, and Zakia had a view of herself in which she was here without Sami; she saw that the ice bucket was empty and went into the kitchen to get more, and on the way she had a quick mental argument with Sami about consideration for people’s needs.

  Dinner appeared: it was biryani that came in plastic bags from the market. Some guests stood around the dining table with plates, chewing and swallowing as they spoke, and others returned to sofas and chairs and to the cushions on the floor, large ones with tiny round mirrors embedded in the fabric. A large woman whose cleavage was emphasized by a low necklace was arguing with a small, enervated woman about the state of women’s education in the country. The fat woman was saying that the private sector was the solution; the thin woman was shaking her head. Someone asked Zakia for the bathroom; she pointed it out; then a woman on the sofa looked her up and down, almost lewdly, and said, “Pretty girl.”

  Zakia blushed.

  “Believe every word she says!” cried a neighboring woman with wildly arching eyebrows. “She’s a first-class portraitist, you know?”

  And the first-class portraitist continued to look admiringly at Zakia, as though she perfectly expected to hear such things said about herself and was glad to have Zakia hear them too.

  It was almost midnight when the doorbell rang again. The guests looked at one another, looked at Hania Apa, who rose with excitement and went to the door. The pause was brief and expectant. And then Hania Apa reappeared, and was holding his hand.

  The guests stood up.

  He was younger in the pictures. Zakia recalled the headlines from the time when he was arrested for conspiring against the government, and again, when he was awarded a prize by the Russians (and not the Nobel Prize, which they didn’t give to communists), and recently too, when the military had blocked him out and he had had to leave the country. Still he was present in conversations, in songs penned by him and sung by others. They said he was the greatest Urdu poet of the century.

  He settled with a halting effort into the chair.

  “Something to eat?” said Hania Apa, who was stooping and held his hand in a devotional clasp.

  The poet touched his belly and said that the doctor wasn’t allowing him too much these days.

  “Something to drink?”

  He assented with a chuckle.

  The conversation returned to its usual precincts. And at every turn now the poet was implored to supply a verse. The lines faltered in his phlegmy voice but were known, it seemed, to every person in the room; there was a mayhem of contributions when he paused or forgot. One poem in particular was summoned again and again. It was a love poem, but the love it described was strained and wearied. The opening verse was a supplication: my love, it said, do not ask me, it said, for that earlier, pristine love. From there it moved to memories of that first love, to the eyes of the beloved (a verse she particularly liked) and their unrivaled place in the world. But the gaze wanders, the gaze returns; and the eyes are not the same. It was this, the banishment, willfully breaking the lull of innocence, that she found obscure and even a little contrived, a plunge into the abstract, a world that bore no relation to the real, which was the truth of the life she was living.

  This world knows other torments than of love,

  And other happiness than a fond embrace;

  Love, do not ask for my old love again.

  She met Sami in the morning. He had come to fetch her from Nargis’s house, where she was staying. They were going to Turtle’s house now (she had agreed), and in the car she was avid and unrestrained. She recounted the details of other people’s conversations with the fervor of a proud participant. The issues raised, the complex analyses, the verses from the poems, all of it had stayed on and acquired a new life in her retelling. She was outraged, she was saddened, she was lively and ironical when imitating the more farcical aspects of the evening, like the first-rate portraitist and her friend with the eyebrows. And then she was solemn and withdrawn, and she said that Moeen had been there too.

  “You didn’t invite me.”

  “Still,” she said, “you could’ve come.”

  They were driving along the canal. Bigger and better cars went past and left them behind.

  He said, “I’ll come tomorrow.”

  “There’s nothing there tomorrow,” she said. And then she said, “They’re not like your boys, they don’t sit around and crack jokes all the time.”

  It was what they did.

  His driving was unaffected by this, but she could tell that his mood had changed. She was glad that he could drive well.

  She said, “You should come with me the next time.”

  “Go yourself.”

  “I will go.”

  “So go. Go.”

  They went to Turtle’s house. But she asked to be taken back to Nargis’s, and Sami didn’t look at her when she said it, and then Turtle summoned a driver and she went alone in the car and went back the next morning on the flight to Karachi.

  He called her when he came to Karachi.

  “You can’t call my house,” she said.

  Her mother came into the kitchenette and went past her to the fridge, didn’t seem to notice, and went out again.

  “You can’t do this, Sami!”

  “Sorry, sorry,” he said. But he was laughing.

  “I’m putting down the phone.”

  “Why!”

  “Because you think it’s funny. It’s not the same for girls. Why can’t you understand that?”

  It was unmerited.

  She said, “Where do you want to meet?”

  And he proposed a place.

  They met at a dingy restaurant in Saddar. The place was empty. The tables had stained plastic tops that displayed a floral design. There was a TV in one corner and it was showing the evening news, which was in Arabic, a new thing.

  “Where do you want to go?” he said.

  She tried to think of a place. She couldn’t take him to a friend’s house because her friends were girls; and she wasn’t going to take him to a hotel.

  He said, “Are there any monuments?”

  She tried to think of monuments. There were none. It came to her that Karachi had no history.

  He said, “What about a park?”

  They couldn’t go to a park. She knew of a girl who had gone to a park with a boy and was stopped there by a policeman, who had asked the couple for their marriage certificate, which was now required in public places, and then taken the boy and the girl to a police station.

  “No parks,” she said. “Where are you going after this?”

  He said there was an air base nearby.

  There were air bases everywhere.

  She said, “No. Forget it. Let’s stay here and eat.”

  And they drank their Cokes and ate a lukewarm meal.

  She went to Lahore again in the spring. She had timed her visit to coincide with his, and was staying again with Nargis. The night of her arrival there was a dinner party at Hania Apa’s house.

  “Can you come?” she said.

  And he said he would.

  She waited for him in that
drawing room, surrounded by people who now knew her name and engaged her in ways that were still novel and exciting. But she was thinking of him. It was like a burden that was also a blessing. It colored everything. She tried to imagine a life in which there wasn’t this kind of waiting, this ever-present need for someone else, a need that was denied and then fulfilled and then denied again. She could no longer imagine such a life, even though she knew, in an abstract way, that she had once lived it.

  The doorbell rang. And she saw that he had worn the right clothes, a proper shirt and trousers, a slim brown belt, and black suede shoes on his feet. His hair was combed in a new way. A sadness came over her. She was surprised by the feeling and tried to banish it, but it stayed. She watched him watch himself. And then her view changed: it was of herself as an impostor. What did she want? She had never thought about it. He had met Hania Apa and shaken hands with her, and was sitting now on one of the cushions. But these conversations didn’t require him. They would go on and on. She went across to the table and made a strong drink.

  “You want?” she said.

  And he said, “Why not.”

  The first-class portraitist was listening, and said, “A supportive husband is a good one.”

  “Oh, no,” said Zakia. “We’re not married.”

  It made her apprehensive.

  The portraitist said, “So get married!”

  She looked at him.

  “Why not.”

  “Why not.”

  They all laughed.

  “Good!” cried the first-class portraitist, and raised her glass grandly.

  So for the rest of the night she was buoyant. She hugged Hania Apa, laughed at many jokes, nodded vehemently when someone made a passionate point about the status quo and said that it must be ruptured by a peasant revolt. Her glass was full. Then the poet arrived, and there were drunken salutations, and Zakia, her arms wide in greeting, leaped up from her cushion on the carpet and went toward the door to receive him. Later in the night the electricity went, and there were groans in the shadowy room, and abruptly it was back but with the sound of shattering glass. A bulb in one of the overhead lamps had burst.